What first triggered your interest in environmental issues?

I have always been interested in my natural surroundings from a young age. I started by trying to understand things and went on a more direct science route as a chemist. The ways that all living thinks and indeed non-living things interact has always been a fascination.

What are you working on, concerned by, or motivated by at the moment?

Im approaching retirement and hope to have more time to spend trying to understand how much history can tell us about change and what makes it happen. I wonder how effective planned change in the long term is. Governments in particular seem to have great difficulty in trying to foretell what effect changes they make will have in the future. Just try to see what was being changed 50 years ago and whether any of the expected changes predicted by governments of that day have actually happened.

What do you anticipate working on, or thinking about, in relation to environmental issues over the next 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years?

I would like to spend more time working on studying as I get more time, I would also like to start doing more voluntary work to help establishing local nature reserves

How optimistic or pessimistic are you as you look at where we might be in 2020, and why?

I would describe myself more as a fatalist, but a pessimist by nature. I think there will likely be some dramatic event that we have not heard of or thought of. When resources/food/energy do start getting short as the resources certainly will then I think it likely that we will have dramatic changes.

The opinions expressed here are those of the respective posters and do not reflect those of the BBC or The Open University. The BBC and The Open University are not responsible for the content of external websites.

About the author

Meet the diarists who are helping to build the most important living archive of human experiences in this decade. The Creative Climate community is made up of people from all around the world, who are personally or professionally motivated by climate change.

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Originally published: Saturday, 7th August 2010

Last updated on: Monday, 9th August 2010

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